


No Shortage of Sordid, No Protest from Me

by dilapidatedcorvid



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Character Study, Content Warning: Ianthe Tridentarius, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Possessive Behavior, Self-Hatred, Semi-Public Sex, Unhealthy Relationships, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:00:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27757291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilapidatedcorvid/pseuds/dilapidatedcorvid
Summary: The realisation disarms you and, with startling audacity, you reach out for her with your flesh hand to take her by the tricep, just above the elbow, and you draw her close. She goes without a fight. In that moment when your eyes meet, your muddied brackish blues and violets with her steadfast, unyielding black of raven feathers, you see a flash of trepidation, and then she is unreadable again.For a moment, you wonder if she will explode your heart within your chest for what you are about to do. Alas, you never did make good decisions inebriated.or, post-orgy dinner hallway scene, but take it two steps to the right.
Relationships: Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Ianthe Tridentarius
Comments: 24
Kudos: 96





	No Shortage of Sordid, No Protest from Me

Your name is Ianthe Tridentarius, Princess of Ida, second in line to the throne of the Third House, and the greatest necromancer in Dominicus of your generation. Next to nothing can faze you.

Watching your mentor, the Saint of Patience, servant to the Resurrecting King, push his tongue into John’s mouth is _far_ from next to nothing. It is sacrilege, it is blasphemy, it is the most _horrifying_ thing your eyes have seen. You think you’re going to vomit. 

Equal parts impressed with Augustine’s plan and utterly embarrassed, you had grabbed your dazed sister Lyctor by the arm and shoved the both of you out the door, letting it slide and click shut as if it could even _dream_ of saving you from the image of what you now understand to be _dios apate,_ major _,_ seared into the backs of your eyelids. 

You turn to her now. Harrow stares back at you, eyes wide, mouth agape, and blushing furiously. It’s flattering, almost, on her pointy features and eternal half-scowl.

She is not beautiful like royalty on Ida. You don’t believe that even Tern’s stitchwork and Corona’s frankly extravagant clothing and makeup sensibilities could turn the bone nun into anything close to resembling Idan beauty. But she looks at you with black holes for eyes, impenetrable voids of swirling nothing interposed between you and the shadow of her body, a thanergetic blind spot that takes up half your field of vision. Her gaze is hot and burns against your skin. Her eyes rake over you, your face, your lips, your neck, your chest. Good. You had chosen your plunging neckline for this express purpose.

You smirk, cheeks flushed, and it is by the tension against your lip that you realise you have been biting on it. You lick them, chapped from your panting, both exhilarated and utterly horrified to bear witness to the Necrolord Divine, Emperor of the Nine Houses, playing tonsil hockey with his hands, his fingers, his gestures. Blood blooms across your tongue, warm and iron-like in the comforting way blood always does: Your own unmoving rock, unrolled stone.

“I suppose this is it,” you say, breathless.

She tilts her head thoughtfully, and the veil slips further off her shoulder. Not for the first time this evening, you find yourself admiring the slope of her shoulders, the definition of her clavicles, the long line of her sternocleidomastoid muscle.

Harrow clears her throat and says, “I appreciate your part in this, Tridentarius.”

For once, there is no contrition in her voice, and without the thick robes draped over her form, with only the shimmering indigo shawl you had pinned to her frame and that wretched skeletal frame she unfailingly cages herself within—save for when she drags herself into your room bloodied and freshly disembowelled, and the day she had lobotomised herself with you at her side—she looks... You lay your eyes on her, on her appallingly pointed chin, and her long, sloping jaw, and her narrow nose, and for the first time—oh King Undying, you are drunk—you see that she is beautiful.

The realisation disarms you and, with startling audacity, you reach out for her with your flesh hand to take her by the tricep, just above the elbow, and you draw her close. She goes without a fight. In that moment when your eyes meet, your muddied brackish blues and violets with her steadfast, unyielding black of raven feathers, you see a flash of trepidation, and then she is unreadable again.

For a moment, you wonder if she will explode your heart within your chest for what you are about to do. Alas, you never did make good decisions inebriated.

Her lips are hot against yours. Hot and still. The first is not surprising; she has always run hot. It’s the latter that worries you for all but a moment. And then her palm, a void of hot, thrumming thalergy, alive and soft despite the truly abysmal lack of mass _anywhere_ , touches your jaw. And instead of shattering your mandible from ramus to protuberance and, with the shards, piercing your palate and painting your cranial interior with Newtonian brain slurry so agitated it drips out your nostrils as you might have feared, she kisses you back.

You sigh, your lips parting, and when you felt the press of her tongue against your mouth, all you can remember is her voice five months ago, raspy with disuse, uttering her fealty to you. You shiver against her.

You separate with dilated eyes and mouth open. And once again tonight—you are experiencing a great number of these—you learn that you were wrong, and worse, a liar unto yourself; you _would,_ consumed with lust, ravish her over a nut bowl, a table, or anything, really. You try to urge words into your mouth, something cutting and witty. Nothing comes to mind, and Harrow saves you the embarrassment by pulling you back down by your neckline and kissing you again, her incisors digging into your bottom lip. Oh, you _like_ that.

Your hand—flesh—wraps around the back of her neck and brushes along the short hairs at her nape. They’re soft under your fingertips, just as you had imagined they’d be when you had—inebriated and lost in your meaningless, indulgent exercise in longing—stared openly at her prior to God’s violent desecration of the sanctity of dinner.

Distantly, you think that you should move. That it would be utterly uncouth to be found, having fled from the King Undying swept up in a tryst with two of his Lyctors, caught in liplock with yet another Saint. Belatedly, you think about how this is Harrow’s chance to kill your Brother, the man of her nightmares, the beast that stalks her through the halls of the Mithraeum, for which this whole night, the debacle occurring behind shut doors and in the hallway now unfolding, has been planned. 

“Ianthe,” she says, pulling away only to breathe, at the same time as you say, “Come with me.”

And what Harrow doesn’t know is that a Tridentarius will say “I know a place” and lead you to her chambers and her bed—over which a painted portrait of a lounging, naked Valency Trinit with a melon tastefully split open between her splayed thighs and her long fingers pressed into the seeded flesh hangs—and she will proceed to strip you naked and ravage you.

But she says: "No, I have to go. I have a duty to fulfill," and the sudden about-face draws a surprised bark of a laugh out of you. The irony of her words does not escape you.

But you have waited for this for so long, _wanted_ for so long. You, a creature who has only ever known how to consume, yourself consumed with lusting, with _longing_ for something that remains cruelly out of reach. It is so close to you now and you are compelled to reach for her, to gamble what dignity remains in you, all to try once more.

"One for the road, then," you say, and when she concedes with a jerking nod, you catch her wrist and, pressing her up against the wall, kiss her again.

Her paint smudges onto your naked face, her claim staked clear as day. And the poor baby, your tragic sister in Sainthood, so lost in the moment and zealous to her cause, will never notice the shackles you have gamely placed on your own wrists. It was a cruel thing to do to your heart, believing you could ever compete with the dead bitch chained up in an ice freezer in a system neither of you can return to, but you have given up everything to get here, and the last thing you desire remains brushed by your fingertips only in the privacy of your fantasies when you sprawl out on your bed and wring half a dozen orgasms out of yourself until you are shivering and oversensitive, and tears track down your hollow cheeks, your throat screamed raw.

You kiss her and she grips your gilded wrist with one hand and fists the other in your long, pallid hair, and she kisses you like someone is going to die tonight.

Her dress, pinned tight against her thighs, presses against yours and you ruck the fabric up around her hips and press your right hand to the outside of her thigh. You feel her quadriceps flex—she’s gained muscle dragging that ghastly two-hander around, but you’ve never seen, never felt until now—and her tongue is a brand in your mouth, burning against yours.

Her skin runs hot, hotter still when you drag your fingertips across her thigh and run them along the seam of her underwear. She is warm, she is wet. She gasps against your bloodless lips and her mouth forms into what could be any myriad of words, so you push the damp fabric aside and you touch her.

She sinks into your embrace when you circle her clit, and she sobs out and shudders, her head falling back and striking the wall when you tease at her entrance. Her hand, cupping the base of your skull, grips tighter, puts pressure against your occipital bone, and you moan against her temple.

Your fingers, two of flesh, fuck artlessly into her knuckle by knuckle until you are buried to the base joint, and, intertwined like this with her ankle hooked around yours and your hands on and in each other, you take her with no small amount of violence.

You fool, you absolute buffoon. This was supposed to be your gift to her in return for the arm with which you now feel the pounding of her pulse, fast as a rabbit’s. But just as you had mocked her then as you laid, bloodsoaked, on your bedroom floor, pressed against each other with panting breath and a thin sheen of sweat across your brow, so now you mock yourself. God forgive you, you have rendered yourself beholden to her in all the ways that matter; your heart and your desire—the only part of yourself you never learned how to control—indebts you to her for the rest of your wretched, eternal life. And oh, the things you would do to thank her! All the ways you would offer yourself, how you would fall on your knees and press your lips to her cunt if only she would hear your adoration, and gods, how you would _enjoy_ it!

There are so many things you wish to do to her, to do _with_ her. You want to take her to your room, and you want to lay on your stomach and bite at her thighs and tongue at her for hours. You want to show her the more obscene appeals of flesh magic and fuck into her with sweetness neither could ever have anticipated from you. You want to tangle your fingers and your limbs in that post-coital bliss when neither of you are clear of mind enough to care, to tease eye contact when you pass in the hallways, to pull on errant wrists when you least expect it and christen every doorway and every hidden nook with your wanton desires.

She is beautiful, and you are a slut for beautiful things. So sue you, and let the one who is without sin throw the first rock.

But you cannot have these things. She has her duty and her cavalier and her tomb, and you have your loneliness. So instead, you stretch her around another finger, you press the heel of your hand against her clit, and you swallow her cries with your bloodied lips.

And in that moment you find that you could not care even if the Necrolord himself walked out from the room behind you with his Saints in tow to see you three knuckles deep inside Harrow, because for even just a moment, you would have absolutely everything you ever wanted, and that alone would make you more powerful than God himself.

When Harrow comes, it is with fingernails raking down your spine and a strangled sound that is incomprehensible to you. Utterly garbled. Clouded by the smell of her desire and high on the taste of her—you _idiot_ —you are confused, and you pull away in time to see her face twist and blood begin to dribble from her nostrils. Comprehension and an ache in your jaw set in, and you are filled with equal parts pity and disgust for the pair of you loathsome fools. You bow your head to where the rivulets have crested over her upper lip and you kiss her. Her blood is sweet; you savour the taste of it behind your incisors.

You could not have been more pathetic if you tried.

You move your fingers out of her and she shakes, blood smeared across her mouth and dried by her panting. “Ianthe,” she says with a quiet voice, and your heart is a fucking tragedy because it breaks. If you could only hear her whisper your name once more this night, you would become Medusa and turn the girl before you into flawless stone and break her arm off to match the marble busts that line the hallways of the Third, you would crown her alive in molten gold, you would suffocate her in amber to have, to hold, to wear, to love for all of eternity.

Your fingers are drenched, and with that very wetness, you would sign your name on the planes of her stomach and brand her for the tens of thousands of years you both have left to live. You would consume her in every conceivable way, and with your newfound might, cast God from his holy throne and rule the cosmos, hand in intangible hand.

Love...true love is acquisitive, and you take and you take and you take because you are a creature enslaved by your own desires and you want and you want and you want. You are Tantalus in Tartarus, cursed with craving, perpetually unsated. The Saint of Hunger.

But this is just another transaction on your tab that looks set to run a myriad and you do not live alternate histories, so you kiss her like you're handing back change.

"Don't die, Harry," you say, pushing your hair back and to the side. And then you pick up your heels where you abandoned them on the ground and, barefoot, walk back to your room, humming, with an ache between your legs, ignoring the one in your chest.

**Author's Note:**

> Ianthe Tridentarius is a tragedy bomb primed and waiting to go off and I, for one, can’t wait for TM to cause grievous emotional damage to me in 2022. [hidethepainharold.jpeg]
> 
> This was supposed to be flesh dick fucking, but then the emotions got the better of me and now you get deeply sad fingerfucking against a wall that turns into just abject misery and self-loathing. My whole brand is, like, intimacy, but make it heart-rending, so since I was going to write Harrow saying Gideon’s name during sex with Ianthe anyways at some point, I wasn’t about to throw it out. Especially after, like, a half month of fic concept droughts and put another month’s worth of work into it because I write super fucking slow. On the bright side, it means that you have been spared my chaos in that there is only one meme reference, minimal Biblical references, and also only one zeugma. Perhaps one day there will be flesh dick fucking. One day...
> 
> Big thanks to The Locked Tomb discord server for putting up with me pinging snippets of this around in the bonezone, and to my wonderful beta, [@searchforthescars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/searchforthescars), who goes in with a scalpel and uses the same point with which she cuts and separates to sew it all back twice as beautiful as it was before. A Sixth metaphor, fitting for one of the Sixth. 
> 
> Title from: Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene by Hozier  
> Alternate title: What if We Kissed… and We Were Both Lyctors
> 
> Tumblr: [frumpkinspocketdimension](https://frumpkinspocketdimension.tumblr.com)  
> Discord: SweetBabyRae#0967


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